Bailey Cait, Farrell Anna, Purty Turam, Taylor Ashley, Disney Jane
Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, Bar Harbor, ME, United States.
Front Clim. 2021 Apr;3. doi: 10.3389/fclim.2021.620100. Epub 2021 Apr 30.
The Anecdata website and its corresponding mobile app provide unique features to meet the needs of a wide variety of diverse citizen science projects from across the world. The platform has been developed with the help of continuous feedback from community partners, project leaders, and website users and currently hosts more than 200 projects. Over 8,000 registered users have contributed more than 30,000 images and over 50,000 observations since the platform became open to the public in 2014. From its inception, one of the core tenets of Anecdata's mission has been to make data from citizen science projects freely accessible to project participants and the general public, and in the platform's first few years, it followed a completely open data access model. As the platform has grown, hosting ever more projects, we have found that this model does not meet all project needs, especially where endangered species, property access rights, participant safety in the field, and personal privacy are concerned. We first introduced features for data and user privacy as part of "All About Arsenic," a National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA)-funded project at MDI Biological Laboratory, which engages middle and high school teachers and students from schools across Maine and New Hampshire in sampling their home well water for analysis of arsenic and other heavy metals. In order to host this project on Anecdata, we developed features for spatial privacy or "geoprivacy" to conceal the coordinates of samplers' homes, partial data redaction tools we call "private fields" to withhold certain sample registration questions from public datasets, and "participant anonymity" to conceal which user account uploaded an observation. We describe the impetus for the creation of these features, challenges we encountered, and our technical approach. While these features were originally developed for the purposes of a public health and science literacy project, they are now available to all project leaders setting up projects on Anecdata.org and have been adopted by a number of projects, including Mass Audubon's Eastern Meadowlark Survey, South Carolina Aquarium's SeaRise, and Coastal Signs of the Seasons (SOS) Monitoring projects.
Anecdata网站及其相应的移动应用程序提供了独特的功能，以满足来自世界各地的各种不同公民科学项目的需求。该平台是在社区合作伙伴、项目负责人和网站用户的持续反馈帮助下开发的，目前托管着200多个项目。自2014年该平台向公众开放以来，超过8000名注册用户贡献了超过30000张图片和超过50000条观测数据。从一开始，Anecdata使命的核心宗旨之一就是让公民科学项目的数据对项目参与者和公众免费开放，在该平台的最初几年，它遵循的是完全开放的数据访问模式。随着平台不断发展，托管的项目越来越多，我们发现这种模式并不能满足所有项目的需求，尤其是在涉及濒危物种、财产访问权、实地参与者安全和个人隐私的方面。我们首次引入数据和用户隐私功能，是作为“关于砷的一切”项目的一部分，该项目由美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）/国立综合医学科学研究所（NIGMS）科学教育合作奖（SEPA）资助，在MDI生物实验室开展，该项目让缅因州和新罕布什尔州各地学校的初中和高中教师及学生对自家井水进行采样，以分析砷和其他重金属。为了在Anecdata上托管这个项目，我们开发了空间隐私或“地理隐私”功能，以隐藏采样者家庭的坐标，开发了我们称为“私有字段”的部分数据编辑工具，以便从公共数据集中隐瞒某些样本登记问题，还开发了“参与者匿名”功能，以隐藏是哪个用户账户上传了观测数据。我们描述了创建这些功能的动机、遇到的挑战以及我们的技术方法。虽然这些功能最初是为了一个公共卫生和科学素养项目而开发的，但现在所有在Anecdata.org上设立项目的项目负责人都可以使用，并且已经被一些项目采用，包括马萨诸塞州奥杜邦协会的东部草地鹨调查、南卡罗来纳水族馆的海平面上升项目以及沿海季节标志（SOS）监测项目。
